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Monday, October 3, 2011

As the holiday shopping season gets closer, three major players, Google Product Search, Bing Shopping and Shopping.com have just announced their newest programs...

Google Launches Trusted Stores

Google just launched their newest pilot Google Trusted Stores, a program designed to help shoppers 'Shop with Confidence' by highlighting merchants who offer 'a great shopping

experience.' This move is very much in line with their recent Google Product Search feed changes, aimed at obtaining more granular, shopper-friendly data. The 'Google Trusted Store' badge is only awarded to sites that demonstrate excellent customer service and on-time shipping performance. When a shopper hovers over the badge, they will see relevant shopping/customer service related metrics, as seen below:

How to become a Google Trusted Store:

To participate, you must voluntarily share shipping data and essentially, be extremely responsive if there are any issues. How? When completing a purchase on a Google Trusted Store, Google will offer the shopper free purchase protection (up to $1,000 lifetime purchase protection for eligible purchases). Then, if there's a problem and a shopper seeks Google's help, they will work with you to address the issue at hand. In turn, Google will collect customer service metrics when shoppers involve Google's with a problem.

Over the coming months, Google estimates, they'll be adding more stores to this pilot program. To apply to become a Google Trusted Store, fill out Google's form.

Bing Shopping Partners Up with Shopping.com

Bing Shopping just announced that they're teaming up with Shopping.com to enhance their existing merchant listing program.

How it works:

Starting November 1st, paid offers from Shopping.com will get higher visibility on Bing Shopping's search result and product pages. To get started, simply get listed on Shopping.com, if you aren't already.

No action necessary, unless you want more traffic from Shopping.com

If you're already on Shopping.com, then you may already have access to higher placements on Bing Shopping and no further action is needed. If you're already on Bing Shopping (and not on Shopping.com), then you don't need to do anything, just be aware that Shopping.com's paid listings merchants will get higher placements. If you're not on Bing Shopping, then you should know that they've paused on boarding of new merchants until further notice.

Want to try it out the Shopping.com/Bing Shopping Duo?

You can start out by submitting a subset of your products/best-sellers to Shopping.com which will get syndicated to Bing Shopping, and see how it affects your sales. To get started with Shopping.com, you can sign up by visiting GoDataFeed'sSupported Channels.